hi everybody!
ever heard of this one? hahaha. its the first book i've read
by chandler. i just finished it and i liked it. he writes
good dialogue and the plot was
interesting and exciting. so he wrote this in 1939 and hammet
came out with _red harvest_ in 1927 and _the maltese falcon_
in 1929. from reading the list i know that chandler was
influenced by hammet. its interesting to watch the evolution
of the genre.
since i joined the rare bird list, i've increasingly found
myself doing more than just reading individual mysteries... i
seem to be thinking a lot about the genre as a whole.
sam spade and philip marlowe certainly have a lot in common,
don't they? looks like the two of them pretty much locked in
the hardboiled protagonist stereotype.
thanks to advice from the group, i picked up a copy of
williams's out-of- print _river girl_ from ebay for a
reasonable price, and i've just started it. i guess i should
also mention that thanks to the group, i heard about charles
williams in the first place. _river girl_ came out in 1951,
so from
_the maltese falcon_, _the big sleep_ and _river girl_, i've
got three books
spanning two decades.
from such a thin sampling, it looks to me like the stereotype
has endured well, but that the original protagonist's attempt
to remain emotionally detached has eroded into an unwanted
and sometimes torturesome
(ok, thats probably not a word, but i liked it more than
"torturous".) self- involvement with the plot.
miker
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